It has heretofore been the practice to manually strip or slide off the backing paper of a water-soaked water-release slide-off decal from the transfer film of the decal during the applying of the transfer film to a surface to be decorated, such as for example, a surface of a dish or dish-like article. Such a manual practice is relatively tedious and time consuming and, therefore, uneconomical. Accordingly, the apparatus and method of the present invention were developed for the stripping of the backing paper of a water-soaked water-release slide-off decal from the transfer film of the decal and for applying such transfer film to the surface of an article to be decorated.